Tagged: Brzezinski

Like it or not, radical Islam is on the rise. And the group spearheading this rise is Muslim Brotherhood. Wherever political Islam is gaining ground, one is almost guaranteed to find the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Take the Gaza Strip, for instance. Most people know that in June of 2007 Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip. What many people do not know is that Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (El Ahl, no pagination). Gaza is the most publicized of the Brotherhood’s successes. However, the group has experienced other victories the media has said little about. In 2005, the Brotherhood made significant political gains in Egypt, increasing its number of independent parliamentarians from 15 to 88 (no pagination). In Jordan, the Brotherhood’s political wing, known as the Islamic Action Front, has become part of Jordan’s political establishment, possessing 17 out of 110 parliamentarians (no pagination). Without a doubt, the Brotherhood’s influence is starting to be felt.

To say the least, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political ascent is impressive. However, without the aid of some powerful forces, the Brotherhood may have never been more than a group of marginalized religious fanatics. The hidden hands of these powerful forces can be seen at work before World War Two with the British travel writer Freya Stark. Stark was not just a writer. She was also an agent of British intelligence. Stark was used by British intelligence to foster an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood (Dorril 622). Brotherhood collaboration with Western intelligence continued with an alliance between the Brotherhood and the CIA that began around 1955. According to former CIA agent Miles Copeland, it was around this time that America began looking for the Muslim equivalent of Billy Graham, hoping to use such a charismatic individual to influence the Arab world. When this failed, the Agency began forging ties with the CIA (Aburish 60-61). What was the motive for this marriage between Western intelligence and the Muslim Brotherhood? This alliance would help the Western power elite neutralize the challenge to their hegemony coming from the secular Arab nationalist movement. Said Aburish elaborates:

In the rush to condemn President-elect Barack H. Obama as yet another tool of the New World Order conspirators, many analysts have been having great sport exploring the views of one of Obama’s higher profile advisers, Trilateral Commission co-founder and former National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. As evidence of Brzezinski’s inclinations towards totalitarian world government many of these earnest analysts have presented what they are claim are quotes from Brzezinski’s most notorious work, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970), the book which launched the trilateral concept and ultimately the Trilateral Commission. The problem is that a number of these quotes do not appear to have come from Brzezinski’s book; at least two are fabrications, while another is a misleading compilation of quotes that have been reordered and stripped of their actual context.

Our first example is in a recent article by the current President of the John Birch Society, John F. McManus, “Behind the Obama Agenda”, which appeared in The New American (Nov. 26, 2008). Describing Brzezinski as “arguably President-elect Obama’s most important adviser”, McManus informs us about Brzezinski’s pedigree:

The inspiration for [David] Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission had been Brzezinski’s 1970 book, Between Two Ages, in which the Polish immigrant argued that “national sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.”

On February 11, 2004, President George W. Bush told the world that it could sleep easy. According to the President, the nuclear black-market network of Abdul Qadeer Khan had been dismantled and the threat of nuclear proliferation had been brought to and end (Isenberg, no pagination). The Bush administration gave itself a pat on the back and Bush apologists gushed with praise. However, new developments have caused the cheerleaders to go silent. A study released by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) shows that the Khan network is anything but dead and gone. Entitled Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A Q Khan and the Rise of Proliferation Networks, the report states the following:

some of Khan’s associates appear to have escaped law-enforcement attention and could, after a period of lying low, resume their black-market business. Decapitating the nodes of non-hierarchical networks does not necessarily eradicate the enterprise. (No pagination)

In our modern world, discomforting truths are usually discarded in favour of fictions. One such fiction is the idea that terrorists are disenfranchised dissidents who independently generate the wealth and resources necessary for their heinous acts. Such is the contention of Professor Mark Juergensmeyer. In his article, “Understanding the New Terrorism”, he says that modern terrorism “appears pointless since it does not lead directly to any strategic goal” (p. 158).

Juergensmeyer arrives at this conclusion because he restricts his examination to the visible perpetrators, whose motives may be, in fact, irrational. However, he does not examine the patrons of terrorism. Given the exceptional subtlety and discretion of terrorism’s shadowy sponsors, Professor Juergensmeyer may just be oblivious to their existence. On the other hand, he could simply be parroting his fellow academicians in order to maintain the status quo.

Whatever the case may be, this contention seems to be the overall view held by the orthodoxy of academia. With such a view vigorously promulgated by the arbiters of the dominant national paradigm, few can recognise those shady individuals who stand to profit from terrorist acts.

To understand terrorism, one must discard the view that arbitrarily characterises it as “a resort to violence or a threat of violence on the part of a group seeking to accomplish a purpose against the opposition of constituted authority” (Adler, Mueller & Laufer, p. 309). Such an impotent notion is predicated upon the hopelessly flawed accidentalist perspective of history. It relegates terrorism, which is the product of conscious effort and design, to the realm of circumstantial spontaneity. In other words, a contrived act suddenly becomes an inexplicable social phenomenon.

“Throughout the world … its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They’re doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America … [They are] freedom fighters.”

Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities — the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 — bin Laden the “freedom fighter” is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a “terrorist mastermind” and an “evil-doer”.

Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt — and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.